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Against Method

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Re: Against Method

#61

Post by affgrff2 »

jdmtheNth wrote: post #38
affgrff2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please help me understand. Who currently believes this and more meta, which people believe that people believe this and who in reality are those groups?

https://www.thc.texas.gov/public/upload/preserve/museums/fil... - page 7 for objectivity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMepYJhI7HU - for non-readers https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/biology/graduate/intersection-sc... https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01312-4

Thanks, I think I understand your question better now. I guess Feyerabend's point is not that there are multiple valid opinions about the world but rather multiple adequate ways on finding (maybe universal) truth about the world. The frameworks you are referencing however seem to emphasize that there is no such thing as objective truth (and that claiming so might even be promoting white supremacy or racism). So I don't see how it would support it.

Re: Against Method

#62

Post by analog31 »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #53
analog31 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A puzzle seems to be why some scientific fields fare better than others, in the face of the replication crisis. Why do we take Maxwell's Equations seriously? It means that replication, while important, is not the be-all and end-all of science research. There must be something else.

Physics (especially classical physics) has the advantage of dealing with things that are both extremely repeatable and consistent, and are just about omnipresent. When a physics model is flawed, you start piling up edge cases that violate our current understanding of physics, until someone comes up with a model that explains most of them while not violating the relatively decent predictive power of the previous model…

Very good points. I think another is that we can develop theories that relate different experimental cases, so that a "replication" doesn't have to be precisely the same study, but different studies in a sense replicate different but overlapping views of the theory.

Re: Against Method

#63

Post by anschwa »

You can't bring up Feyerabend without mentioning Imre Lakatos. The "methodology of scientific research programmes" is another fun read that takes the matter of demarcation a bit more seriously than AM.

For example, Lakatos isn't satisfied with "anything goes" because it fails to consider the political and social consequences of being unable to recognize science from pseudoscience. For Lakatos, demarcation is necessary to maintain a "standard of objective honesty", and avoid falling into an "intellectual decay".

Overall, Lakatos is much less provocative than Feyerabend, but is equally invested in picking apart the historical nuances of scientific progress brought into question by Popper and Kuhn.

Re: Against Method

#64

Post by polypodiopsi »

stdbrouw wrote: post #13

To understand Feyerabend, you have to understand the project of 20th-century philosophy of science, which was to figure out the secret sauce, the one true scientific method, so that it could then be more rigorously applied and policed in various sciences and well-maybe-sort-of-sciences, and serve to separate science from pseudoscience such as psychoanalysis. In that context, Feyerabend was perceived as a total loon f…

Its hard to speak of epistemology without mentioning Foucault. He's a great philosopher of the history of knowledge and its preconditions. I have not read Feyerabend (yet) though. But if he's going deep into the history of knowledge, there will be at least some associative closeness if not one in methodology. Foucault, studied under Georges Caguilhem who was an influential philosopher of sience. Another student of his is Gilbert Simondon, a philospoher of technology who was writing on the process of the individuation of machines. I say this because I sometimes get the impression that some people, especially those educated in the US, have a quite distorted impression of the so called continental tradition. Also if one was to speak of a certain group of philosophers in France after May 68 like Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze (who are actually rather different thinkers), they are commonly reffered to as post-structuralists, not post-modernists. Haven't heared the latter term to often in philosophical debates as in use for people. Of the top of my head I can' t really think of a person that could function as representative of postmodernism as a coherent school of thought, besides maybe Francis Fukuyama. Maybe thats different in US discourse. The term post-modernists always sounds a bit funny to me, like the "Neomarxists" that haunt the plot of Southland Tales.

Re: Against Method

#65

Post by pksebben »

culi wrote: post #49

I think ultimately the biggest problem science has is the type of thinking that fuel's things like "Occam's razor". It's the same reason why things like Euclid's 5th Postulate (the Parallel postulate) puzzled so many mathematicians for so many years. It wasn't till the 19th century that non-Euclidean geometries were finally considered, but it seems pretty obvious in hindsight given how rare flat 2d planes actually ar…

thanks for sharing your views; I hadn't thought of ideology as that "fourth category" but it resonates deeply.

Re: Against Method

#66

Post by BlueTemplar »

polypodiopsi wrote: post #64
stdbrouw wrote: post #13

To understand Feyerabend, you have to understand the project of 20th-century philosophy of science, which was to figure out the secret sauce, the one true scientific method, so that it could then be more rigorously applied and policed in various sciences and well-maybe-sort-of-sciences, and serve to separate science from pseudoscience such as psychoanalysis. In that context, Feyerabend was perceived as a total loon f…

Its hard to speak of epistemology without mentioning Foucault. He's a great philosopher of the history of knowledge and its preconditions. I have not read Feyerabend (yet) though. But if he's going deep into the history of knowledge, there will be at least some associative closeness if not one in methodology. Foucault, studied under Georges Caguilhem who was an influential philosopher of sience. Another student of hi…

We are "all" postmoderns at this point.

Einstein ; Gödel ; Popper => Kuhn => Feyerabend (among others) have basically wrecked the big modern positivist project (not that I blame them).

Quite related :

https://medium.com/s/story/peterson-historian-aide-m%C3%A9mo...

And :

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/french-theory-how-foucault-derrida-...

Re: Against Method

#67

Post by 8bitsrule »

Somehow (I still wonder) I got to spend an afternoon as a fly-on-the-wall (what could I say?) at a seminar which included Feyerabend and Feigl. Feyerabend was a very down-to-earth fella, with a unique history, and well-armed to defend his thesis. (I know of no Feynman/Feyerabend discussion, but there'd be much common ground.)

Polanyi -was- a scientist, and his recognition of the influence of tacit knowledge ... 'an understanding that defies articulation' is equally essential. We all know things we cannot tell.

Re: Against Method

#68

Post by BlueTemplar »

cowfish wrote: post #19

I think I remember Imre Lakatos (another 20th century philosopher of science) saying that one application of philosophy of science is to determine which 'research programs' should (continue to) be funded. Later in life, after becoming a software engineer, it occurred to me that point of view has some resemblance to managers trying to determine whether a software engineer or a team of engineers are doing good work. If…

Yeah, Wikipedia is nice, but really doesn't hold a candle to Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy that insists on the "half-book" part : https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/#AgaiMeth1970

Re: Against Method

#69

Post by heisenzombie »

jfengel wrote: post #60
heisenzombie wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard agree. People are surprised when I, as a physicist, am so riled up by things like “trust science!” T-shirts and the general science-washing (a-la green-washing) of products, politics, etc. I think this is part and parcel of the same “cargo-cult” appropriation of “science” that results in what you’re saying, and represents a real threat to science.

I would say that "trust science!" tee-shirts aren't really about Feyerabend's epistemological anarchy. You could frame it that way, but that would be philosophy-washing (to coin a term). Against Method points out that there's no rigorous method for pursuing the difference between truth and non-truth, but at least accepts that there is something like "truth" out there and that it's better than falsehoods. When people…

I was responding to the parent’s

“ non-scientists try to assert "the scientific method." Imposing a rigid methodology on science, that doesn't reflect the reality of how science is done, can be used as a weapon against science.”

I think the “trust science” stuff is mixed into the same cargo-cult co-opting of science by people who are actually more worried about politics, identity, and generally what I would call “scientism”. To be clear, I think such people would NOT like Feyeraband. If you believe science is The One Source Of Truth, then Feyeraband is a heretic.

You’re also bringing in the other side: Those that reject science for cultural reasons. I think they don’t give a crap about Feyeraband. I also think the “trust science” scientism stuff is partly to blame for this cultural backlash.

I think Feyeraband is right, and that it strengthens the pursuit of science to acknowledge it.

I think scientism leads to the scientific method being misunderstood and misapplied, and makes public trust of science way more brittle.

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